Thursday, January 9, 2014

Got the T-Shirt

Watched Rush last night. Not the band (ha!), the film. (Terrible title btw). I'm not a big fan of F1, but the story of James Hunt and Niki Lauda's intense rivalry, focussing on the 1976 championship, is as good as you get (although Asif Kapadia's Senna is great too). The two were chalk and cheese: Hunt the hot-headed playboy, Lauda the cool, calculating introvert. Both, however, rebelled against privileged backgrounds. That season had everything, including of course Lauda's horrific crash. In the end Hunt won the Championship by one point in the farcical, rain-soaked, can't-count-the-laps last race in Japan.He won it in a McLaren, but the film starts with his first team, Hesketh Racing, owned by the eccentric Lord Hesketh. The two were a perfect match. For some reason I used to have a Hesketh Racing T-shirt and for some other reason it featured a teddy bear in a crash helmet.